Roemer key to U.S.-India relationship

When former Indiana congressman Timothy Roemer arrived in New Delhi in July as President Barack Obama’s new ambassador to India, he inherited one of the few U.S. international relationships that had dramatically improved during the Bush administration.

George W. Bush had reversed course from the sanctions and hectoring the Clinton administration employed toward India after its 1998 nuclear tests and left it to India and Pakistan to resolve their dispute over Kashmir. Most of all, under Bush, India felt that it had managed to at long last escape from being lumped with Pakistan and Afghanistan as problem children of the region.

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But well before Roemer’s arrival there were concerns in New Delhi about the new administration. Those concerns have continued, making the state visit this week of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in the words of Nicholas Burns, a high-ranking State Department official, “a very big symbolic gesture toward India” by the new administration.

Shortly before the 2008 presidential elections, Obama created considerable anxiety in New Delhi when he told Time magazine that as president he would seek to mediate the Kashmir dispute, even mentioning Bill Clinton as a possible envoy for the task. India was none too pleased and vigorously and successfully lobbied against it.

Just last week, Indians took great offense at two speeches Obama made on his trip to Japan, China and Korea. In Tokyo, Obama gave a speech on the importance of Asia without once mentioning India. And in a joint statement with Chinese Premier Hu Jintao, Indians saw signs of Obama encouraging a larger Chinese role in mediating relations between historical rivals India and Pakistan.

While perhaps inadvertent, such slights suggest “that nobody in the Obama administration is standing up now for India,” said C. Raja Mohan, a professor of South Asian studies currently on a fellowship at the Library of Congress.

Burns, a former undersecretary of state for political affairs and now a professor at Harvard, attributes some of the problem to the administration's simply having too many balls in the air. “The problem is that [the Obama administration] has been so focused by necessity on Afghanistan and Pakistan and on building the relationship with China that there is the perception that it is not spending as much time thinking about the India relationship,” he told POLITICO.

But in Roemer, the exquisitely sensitive U.S.-Indian relationship is being managed by someone with a finely tuned political ear, as well as with less-known but serious academic and policy credentials — he has a Ph.D. in government from Notre Dame and after leaving Congress served as president of the Center for National Policy, a Washington think tank.

“Peace and stability, and a peaceful relationship between Pakistan and India, is very much in the U.S. interest,” Roemer said in an interview with POLITICO last week, after arriving in Washington ahead of Singh’s visit. “And any kind of talks between India and Pakistan, India and Pakistan will determine the pace and character and progress of those talks.”

To the task, the former six-term congressman brings a prodigious interest in intelligence, counterterrorism, and nonproliferation issues and a reputation as a heartland centrist who earned Obama’s gratitude for his endorsement. Roemer burnished his foreign policy reputation as a member of the joint House and Senate intelligence panel that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, where he had a reputation for his keen interest in the raw data and his spending hours doing research.

Eleanor Hill, who served as staff director of the joint inquiry, recalls Roemer frequenting the special secure suite in the Ford House Office Building where the records were kept, proceeding to spend hours poring over documents and staff statements.

“A lot of them can’t spare the time to do that,” said Hill, “and he made sure he made the time to do that.”

Hill noted that Roemer didn’t just learn about terrorism but about counterterrorism as well, a study that she said perfectly correlates to his work now in India.

After retiring from the House, Roemer continued to immerse himself in counterterrorism and intelligence issues serving as a member of the independent 9/11 Commission. Fellow former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton, co-chairman of the commission and another occasional Obama confidant, said Roemer was a key consensus builder in the bipartisan group dealing with hugely sensitive and often politicized issues.